Simson L. Garfinkel is the Chief Scientist and Chief Operating Officer of BasisTech in Somerville, Massachusetts. He was previously a program scientist at AI2050, part of Schmidt Futures. He has held several roles across government, including a Senior Data Scientist at the Department of Homeland Security, the US Census Bureau's Senior Computer Scientist for Confidentiality and Data Access and a computer scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. From 2006 to 2015, he was an associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. In addition to his research, Garfinkel is a journalist, an entrepreneur and an inventor; his work is generally concerned with computer security, privacy and information technology.

NeXT, Inc. was an American technology company headquartered in Redwood City, California that specialized in computer workstations for higher education and business markets, and later developed web software. It was founded in 1985 by CEO Steve Jobs, the Apple Computer co-founder who had been forcibly removed from Apple that year. NeXT debuted with the NeXT Computer in 1988, and released the NeXTcube and smaller NeXTstation in 1990. The series had relatively limited sales, with only about 50,000 total units shipped. Nevertheless, the object-oriented programming and graphical user interface were highly influential trendsetters of computer innovation.